mastodon-redirect

Since Twitter decided to block Mastodon URLs, I've created this redirect website to automatically redirect to your Mastodon profile URL.

NOTE: No longer being updated/hosted, Twitter stopped blocking Mastodon links at some point, which means this is no longer needed.

Website Usage

You'll need to first go to the website to generate the link, Mastodon Redirect, by entering the Mastodon profile in the @[username]@[mastodon.server] format, and then you'll be able to generate a working URL that should avoid Twitter blocking.

Examples of generation URLs:

• Profile URL: https://andrew-j-larson.github.io/mastodon-redirect/?p=AlienDrew@mstdn.social
• Username and Server URL: https://andrew-j-larson.github.io/mastodon-redirect/?u=AlienDrew&s=mstdn.social
• Username and Server URL (Alt): https://andrew-j-larson.github.io/mastodon-redirect/?s=mstdn.social&u=AlienDrew

Examples of redirecting URLs:

• Profile URL (works on most sites): https://andrew-j-larson.github.io/mastodon-redirect/?p=AlienDrew@mstdn%2Esocial
• Profile URL (@ replaced with %40; works on all sites): https://andrew-j-larson.github.io/mastodon-redirect/?p=AlienDrew%40mstdn%2Esocial

Notes on crafting redirect URLs:

If you are crafing these links manually, you must:

1. replace all . with %2E in the server part of the link
2. replace all mastodon with %6D%61%73%74%6F%64%6F%6E in all parts of the link

Notes on Twitter detection and blocks:

Twitter will block links if it senses either of the following:

• If the URL is a Mastodon server, e.g. https://mstdn.social/
• If mastodon is somewhere in the URL, e.g. https://i.redirect.to.mastodon/... or https://example.com/mastodon/...
• If a website parameter uses a Mastodon server (with or without percent encoding, is still detected), e.g. ?server=mstdn.social

Updating Mastodon Servers List

When the list is out of date, you can run the following bash script, update-mastodon-servers-list.sh, from the root of the repo, and it should work just fine. No admin rights needed (unless you don't have wget and/or curl installed).

After running the script like so:

• ./update-mastodon-servers-list.sh

It should have updated the custom.js file's mastodonServers variable. Note, it only grabs the servers that are UP (active servers only).